


vicennial river

by campholmes



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: M/M, a bit of a slow burn, awkward meetings and passionate fucking, katya lives in the woods, non au 20 years from now, rascal katya... 70s vibes, suzanne by leonard cohen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-04-04 12:30:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14020296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campholmes/pseuds/campholmes
Summary: It’s still raining, and he’s lucky to be wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. He flips it up, drags his suitcase behind him to sit on a damp bench in front of the small, old fashioned building withCity Hallin block wooden letters above the doorway. He thinks that he’s early, and his phone confirms. Katya will be here in fifteen minutes. He wonders if she’ll even answer to that name anymore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Get ready for this filth,
> 
> In reality the filth is a ways in! I hope everyone likes this one. It was a real doozy to write, I practically didn't stop writing for two days straight. This is a little bit of angst, a little bit of tension, a lot of internal drama, etc. This is set 20 years from now, and 8 years since Trixie and Katya have spoken. None of this is a premonition, none of this is real. It's a locked fic for a multitude of reasons. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Let me know what you think! This is full of callbacks to my older fics, as well as plenty of moments inspired by Leonard Cohen's works. Pronouns should not be confusing, because I've stuck with Brian and he/him for Trixie (we are in his head), and Katya and she/her for Katya. It never deviates from that!
> 
> I couldn't not post this today. Cheers to my true love! tumblr = ourladybeatrice

Brian Firkus is not someone who spends a lot of his time thinking about what could have been. He doesn’t do it, has never done it. He’s never seen a reason for it, and for this he has often found himself criticized: called uncaring, questioned for not trying. In his defence, he’s always considered trying despite inevitable failure a waste of energy, but not in a _bad_ way. He focuses his energy on other things, instead. Things that make sense, goals that are realistic. He’s forty-nine, and this system has not failed him yet.

It’s been eight years since Brian last saw Katya, and he hasn’t bothered to call her up in that time, either. It isn’t that he doesn’t miss her, that he doesn’t feel her absence every single day, in however small of a way that he may. He does. He thinks about her before bed, in the shower, at the gym when he’s overcome with being so young and stupid all he cared about was when he would be on TV next. 

She hasn’t called him either, and he’s been just fine with it. 

Something inside him is telling him that she’s genuinely forgotten, that he’s slipped her mind just as fast as the drag did, to spend half the day on a yoga mat and the other half planning her next art over pages and pages of loose-leaf paper and empty bags of chips. Something tells him that she’s completely lost to her own world and has been for nearly a decade. She’s 56, now, he’s acutely aware of it, and she’s spent a lot of time not doing what so encompassed her twenties and thirties. And that includes, apparently, ignoring all of her old friends until they forgot or gave up. 

He loves it, a little. It’s so on-brand for her, the selfishness that she realized the necessity of, the disregard for others needs in putting her own first. 

And now she’s texted him from an unknown number, out of nowhere, sent him an address that checks out to be in the middle of the fucking forest in Massachusetts, asking him to have a little stay at her place, for as long as he wants. It’s on fucking brand. Her brand is watertight, after twenty years of bullshit.

He agrees to it. He can see the merit in it, doesn’t realize how much he’s missed her until the text comes through. He’s all in- he doesn’t have a single thing tying him down except for some bookings he promised he would sort out for some young girls, and he gets all of it done as quickly as possible, for Katya. She didn’t posit her wishes to see him as an emergency, but a text after years of radio silence is enough to get his blood thrumming deep beneath his skin, to get his stomach twisting every single day that he wakes up still in West Hollywood. 

It feels different. The comfort that he had speaking to her so many years ago has shifted to something else in his gut, something shaky and new, something that feels a lot like winning All Stars, uncertain if he deserved it. This discomfort is distinctly relying on his ideations of what could have been. He hates it, but for the first time in his life, he wants to know. He _needs_ to know, needs to see what Katya’s been up to.

They text on-and-off in the time that he’s wrapping up business in California, as he’s packing and booking his flight. It’s mostly directions to her place, bus routes that come into the town she’s close to, things of the sort. He feels a heady sort of dizziness whenever his phone lights up with her name, and he ignores it every time. The way that it feels as if no time has passed is mildly disturbing.

She types very seriously now, whereas when she was in Los Angeles she would type as rapidly as possible, missing punctuation and capitals throughout. It makes him feel as if she’s yelling at him, a little bit, despite his own text style matching hers. He works to get over it, feels like a big baby. It’s hard to not, when she’s presumably ascended to a higher plane than him. He’s a washed up has-been, and she quit while she was ahead.

He feels guilty for thinking it.

They don’t much discuss anything other than the logistics. Brian is half-glad for it, doesn’t want to be forced into awkward conversation with someone he once knew. He’d much rather be able to see her face-to-face, so that he could read the mood of the room before trying to land a tired joke.

When the day of his departure comes, he has literally nobody to tell about it. Not a single person, but for his sisters, one in Montana and one in New York. He texts them that they’ll be the first to know when his plane lands, and he locks the door of his house with a kind of jittery anticipation. By morning, he’ll be face-to-face with Katya, and he has no idea what she even looks like, anymore. He’s sure she’s old and grizzled, drowning in wrinkles.

He sleeps through the entire plane ride. He always does, it’s been the one constant of his adult life. So in no time, he’s landing in Boston, in an airport that he vaguely recognizes from arriving to Katya’s stringy arms wrapping around his waist and squeezing, only to take him back to her apartment to make legendary moves on his ass.

He’s alone this time, though, and is giving himself time to meditate on what the next two weeks will entail. He tries to steel himself for the inevitable awkwardness, prepare himself for Katya picking him up outside of the city hall in some desolate farm town. He’s enchanted by the idea of her living in the middle of nowhere, a proper hermit. He wonders if she’s made friends where she lives, or if she travels to Boston to visit old ones.

He catches his bus, settles into his seat in the swampy summer air. It’s cloudy, and it begins to sprinkle as the bus starts up. He hasn’t been on a tour bus in years, but this greyhound is reminiscent of his earliest drag days, scooting down to Chicago for the weekend. He feels young and alone, and it gives him further curiosity as to how Katya must have felt to want to move here. He certainly can’t see the appeal, but he hopes that maybe he’ll have an idea of it by the time he leaves.

The bus jolts to a stop and jogs him from a dream, two hours west. He unsticks his cheek from the window and sits up, grabs his backpack from the overhead compartment and thanks the driver as he leaves to grab his suitcase from below.

It’s still raining, and he’s lucky to be wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. He flips it up, drags his suitcase behind him to sit on a damp bench in front of the small, old fashioned building with _City Hall_ in block wooden letters above the doorway. He thinks that he’s early, and his phone confirms. Katya will be here in fifteen minutes. He wonders if she’ll even answer to that name anymore.

The bus pulls away and Brian reclines further on the bench. The summer leaves are dripping with rain, and he bets that this dry yard he’s sitting in is blasted by the sun on any other given day. The grass is practically straw, and the street is deserted.

In five minutes, a small black car pulls up the street. Brian turns his head to the side, to try and deduce who’s driving without seeming like he’s staring. And the glint of a bald head matching his own, the flash of white teeth behind undeniable scruff confirms that Katya is just as compassionate about being there for everyone _early_ , just as she always has been. It was one of her least favorite parts of doing shows, that she would always inevitably be late.

She pulls up to the bench, rolls down the passenger window to grin at him. She waves with a giggle, her eyes are so bright that he feels a little off-center. He laughs outright, squeals and yanks the door open, and he has her in his arms before he can even think about what he’s doing.

She’s warm, she’s wearing a thin white t-shirt and her beard is sharp against his cheek. She’s laughing along with him, and it’s the exact same laugh she’s been hacking for years and years. She feels bigger, harder, and squishier around her middle. He squeezes, unable to help it, and she slaps his shoulder playfully.

“Trix,” she mumbles. She smacks a kiss to his neck and pulls back, and he takes her tan face in again, for the first time in eight years.

She has wrinkles fucking everywhere, she seems to have continued her disavowal of botox that came suddenly out of nowhere, after she’d gotten it, like most everything did. Her eyes are framed with the same blonde lashes, and her brows are thick and arching, speckled with gray. Beneath her beard the lines of her face, greet her deeper, longer crow’s feet joyfully.

Her teeth are just as perfect, and her tan is perpetual. She has a few more freckles, like she’s been living outside half the time. 

They’ve been staring at each other, Brian is kneeling on the passenger seat as Katya’s eyes rove over the lines of his cheeks and the expanse of his shoulders in his sweatshirt. Until she barks another laugh, kisses him on the cheek, and slams her hand on the dashboard.

“Oh, mama… you are a handsome old man. I did not expect you to age well,” she says. He shrieks, bends his knees to bring both feet to the pavement, turns and waves a lazy hand in her direction, back to pick up his discarded suitcase and backpack. She pops the trunk, and he lobs both inside. His phone is tucked into his backpack, and he finds that he couldn’t possibly give less of a shit if someone is texting him. It’s like a magnet is pulling him to Katya’s side. The passenger seat is already warm.

She grips his bicep the moment he settles himself down, leans over to hug him tightly again. 

“I missed you,” he babbles. His voice is much too loud for the air-conditioned interior, he can feel the gruffness of his throat choking him up. But she nods over and over, looking into his eyes. 

“I missed you so much. I asked Fena for your number, I went without a phone for two years. You had changed it, y’know? I thought I might never talk to you again and I just had to, uh, make peace with that. But can we talk about this-”

“Tonight? Yeah. I’m exhausted, honestly. I hope you have food at this place,” he interrupts. She snorts, and they fall into a companionable quiet. Brian can still feel a lump in his chest, one that’s grown due to her scruff, her grumbling voice, and her hairy arms that flex as she turns down a dirt road. 

He’s trusting her, with the full understanding that she could be taking him to her murder cabin in the woods. He accepts that this may be one of his last moments on earth, if only for how she keeps looking over and smiling at him. The gray hairs of her beard glint in the rainy atmosphere.

She looks settled in her body. Her fingers tap against the wheel every now and again, but mostly she is rooted to her seat in a way he’s never seen her before. She doesn’t seem tired, but she’s grounded. It’s apparent to him even with the missing years between them. It’s weird to him, how easy it’s always been to read her.

He has murky flashbacks of many backstage encounters with local queens that would stare her down, past welcoming her with fake fanfare. Brian has shameful recollections of glaring right back, of pulling one girl into the bathroom to threaten her drunkenly for laughing cruelly at Katya’s rambling.

He had seen how she had shut down afterwards, and he’s always known how to coax her back out of it. She keeps her fingers dangling right by his thigh the entire drive to her house. His skin aches, imagining hugging her again. He can still feel her side against him. His sweatshirt is still warm.

Her house is just off the highway, up a dirt road. She has a little black mailbox with the number 73 stickered on. He can’t stop fixating on how she lives here, how she probably comes down to get the mail every single day, cup of coffee in hand. She probably does it barefoot, or in some stupid sandals. God, he’s missed her.

He’s missed her so much that his eyes rush with tears once she pulls up to the weathered spot of grass surrounded by tall pines that is obviously her regular parking space. The car smells like her, like laundry detergent and tiredness, like her skin, that used to smell like cigarettes and Tom Ford from two nights before, but that eventually began to smell like incense, like peace and quiet. 

He gathers himself before she can look over to him again, but he knows that once she does the rims of his eyes will be red. He doesn’t care. She turns the car off after she’s popped the trunk for him, and they both exit at the same time. The doors slam shut in quick succession in the quiet of the woods, and Katya meets him at the trunk.

He can’t stop himself, wraps her smaller frame up in his long arms. She sighs into him, melts against him slowly. Her beard scrapes against his neck, and her nose whistles. It sets him off, and then he’s crying against her warm ear. He’s as quiet as he possibly can be, but she knows, and she grips him tighter. Her hands slide across his back, scraping her blunt nails along the fabric of his sweatshirt.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry,” she says. Her voice is muffled, but he can feel hot tears drip down the back of his neck. Both of them cry at the drop of a hat, always have, and it’s like when they used to get started and couldn’t stop, back in the day. It would continue in proper drama until Katya would laugh at the both of them, and then they would take deep, grounding breaths.

“Why would you apologize? It’s not like I tried any harder than you,” he replies, working overtime to ensure his voice is understandable. It’s true: people knew where Katya was, she wouldn’t have left literally without a word. He could have tried, but he was too scared to. He isn’t going to blame himself, so he would rather she not blame herself.

The woods around them are so fucking quiet that Brian is surprised she can even stand it. The sound of their collective breathing is echoing against the trees, bare in the atmosphere. Katya is the first to pull away again, and she pinches his cheek with a shaky hand, lifts his suitcase out of the trunk and leaves his backpack for him.

Her house is a two-story white Victorian, one you would expect to maybe see in the oldest part of a city. A wide porch wraps around the entire thing, and all of it seems to be sinking down on one side. The three steps up to the porch creak as she climbs them in her black sneakers, and the front door is unlocked. The house has big windows all around the first floor, the paint is chipping shamelessly. 

The woods lead everywhere around the house. It’s different from where Brian grew up: excavated farmland, rolling hills covered in trees that broke off to nestle multiple farms and homes between. Expanses of wide grass, with maybe ten trees in sight. All of it is woods here, he would get lost in a minute.

He’s standing on the porch, and he picks up his feet to follow Katya inside. There are dinner plates covered in half-melted candles in the corner, on a little table with a rocking chair beside it. 

Inside, Katya is slamming a door shut, and he stares around the front room with wide eyes. All of the walls have been painted white, bar for the dark wood detailing, and she has a wide tapestry of embroidered flowers hanging on the wall across from the windows. He doesn’t know why he imagined Katya’s home for the past eight years to be barren and minimalist, but it is decidedly not that. She has one single, well-groomed plant that could just as well be an actual tree on the floor where a TV would probably usually rest.

She has one big couch, a purple one that seems overstuffed, with purple pillows in many different shades. He also recognizes pieces of furniture from her past homes, the little yellow table that’s also teeming with candles, the little knick-knacks that are half fan gifts from years and years ago sitting joyfully on her bookshelf. 

All of it has been dusted, everything smells faintly of cleaning products behind the incense and scented candles. It makes him laugh, that she was worried about what he would think. It makes his chest cave in.

Every window has a different color curtain, one is bright pink and another is a murky green pattern. He walks through to what he presumes is the guest bedroom, but it turns out to just be an empty room with candles on the windowsills, creaky wood floor perfectly swept, blue yoga mat spread open in the middle of the space. He backs out, turns down the hall to try and find Katya.

She’s in the kitchen, where there are brand new appliances as of whenever she moved in. It makes him feel better, that she isn’t using a gas stove or something of the sort, that she isn’t cooking beans in the massive fireplace in the living room for dinner every night. He had assumed, after discovering she was living in the woods.

“You can look in the fridge for something for dinner, or I can make something in a minute. I just have to figure out this air mattress for a second. Or- wait. Do you want to sleep on the couch? I feel like that might be better…” she trails off with a hand to her mouth, squinting out the window above the sink to the backyard. 

He feels like it’s awkward. The sun is coming out from behind the clouds, spilling into the kitchen through said window, and the matching window above the little two-person table in the corner.

“I can sleep anywhere, Katya. I don’t give a shit. The couch would probably be easier, I’ll take it,” he answers. She turns back to him with wide eyes, as if she’s just realized he’s there.

“Oh. Okay! I’ll just get the sheets and blankets, then. You look in that fridge.” And then she’s gone, up the stairs to find them.

He searches through the well-stocked refrigerator, and finds himself making a veggie pasta for the both of them as she is fiddling around with the sheet in the living room. It makes him want to scream, the silence and the comfort of it all. Her house is lived-in, and he wants to ask her if she’s really lived alone for all of this time. She has a plant hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen, and it’s vines have latched onto the windowsill. He keeps brushing his forehead across them as he walks past.

Once she’s done making his bed, she comes up behind him at the stove and peers over his shoulder at what he’s making. She hums in appreciation, her breath tickles the back of his neck. He still wants to scream. He takes a deep breath once she turns away, digs around in the cabinets for plates and forks.

“I have water and juice. Oh, and Coke,” she says. She’s setting the little table in the corner. Brian assumes that she just doesn’t have a proper dining room, it makes sense for living alone. Her socked feet slide across the floor to the fridge, and he turns to see her looking over at him with raised eyebrows.

She hardly looks _old_ , and it’s freaking him out. He would fully accept any explanation that teetered on the edge of witchcraft, but he’s certain that it’s merely because she’s always seemed ten years younger. Her gray brows twist as she watches him stare at her.

“Um, juice. That’s good,” he mumbles. She nods, with the tiniest smile, and pulls the orange juice out of the fridge. He hopes to god that it doesn’t have pulp. He finishes the meal just as Katya is standing at the table, sipping at her glass of water, staring out at the sunset. The grass is wet from the rain, and there’s a steady _drip, drip, drip_ from the tree just outside, now that the noise from the boiling water is gone. 

She silently comes up to accept two scoops of pasta on her red plate, and then his in her other hand, and he follows her to the tiny table.

She looks fucking woodsy, well-fed with rosy cheeks and bigger arms. Her shirt stretches across her shoulders that have always been so much broader than her little waist. They’re almost too close together at the table, he can see each and every one of her eyelashes, every patch of gray in her beard. His heart is beating so loudly that she must be able to hear it. 

“This is good, Trix. Thank you for making it,” she says. Her voice is quiet, she’s nearly whispering, and he wants to break the tension with an axe, chop it in half so that it quits. It makes him miss her even more than he has the past eight years, and he hates it. _You shouldn’t have fucking come, she’s crazy for inviting you_ , his brain screams. The blood is rushing in his ears.

“No problem,” he responds. It feels like he hasn’t spoken in days. He hits himself metaphorically at his own stupidity.

His name in her mouth is more than he remembered. His shifted feelings about her have twisted up in his stomach, snapped at the sound of her voice. Their foreheads may as well be touching with how close the size of the table forces them to be. And Brian has never been more uncomfortable in his entire life.

It’s the ghost of something so past, something so long ago that he hardly relates to anymore. He doesn’t know her anymore, doesn’t know this organized, bearded woman, with a stocked refrigerator, living in the middle of nowhere. He doesn’t know her, and it’s tearing him apart a little bit.

“Hey- I can see what you’re thinking.” She clears her throat, fist to her lips. Her cough is deep and rumbling, a sound that he does know. She’s blushing, and he’s grateful at her recognition of the moment.

“Yeah-”

“No, lemme talk. I see what you’re thinking, and I know. We can meet each other again.”

She’s a prophet on her creaky chair, the orange sunset spilling across her face. He breathes in, fresh air filled with the smells of her home. He leans back, from the little space they’ve made uncomfortably on the tile floor, stretches his back.

“You’re right,” he says. His voice wavers, and she smiles cautiously.

He sleeps restlessly on the couch. It’s much too squishy to be comfortable. It smells a lot like fireplace smoke, and it gives him the distinct feeling of being truly isolated. It’s lonely in the looming living room, and he still hasn’t been upstairs. He has free reign over the downstairs bathroom, and he took the time to put out all of his belongings, stake his claim, before putting his pajamas on post-shower to go to bed.

She takes a while to settle into bed, he can hear the floor creaking above his head for about an hour. It keeps him awake, but the lonely feel of the place keeps him awake longer, far after she’s presumably fallen asleep. He wishes, in a three am bout of depression, that they were young again, in Boston, that Katya’s slim fingers were gripping his ass beneath her sheets. 

He misses it so much that his chest and stomach ache, but he shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut in the pitch black, takes the deepest breaths he can until he knocks himself out.

 

 

The next morning, Katya wakes very early. He’s awoken before the sun comes up to her climbing down the stairs, creaking down the hall to shut the door of the little room beside the kitchen. He hears the flick of a lighter in the silence, drifts off to the sound of her feet hitting the floor and her deep breaths. He wishes he could watch her do her yoga, thinks it would maybe give insight as to why she’s changed so much.

He thinks it has more to do with the isolation than the yoga, though. He wishes that he had brought his guitar, wonders if he should send for it. Once he falls back to sleep, he dreams of Katya disappearing again, from this very house. He dreams of waking up in the fall, windows wide open and leaves flying in, silence meaning complete solitude, Katya nowhere to be found.

When he wakes up for the second time, Katya is making breakfast in the kitchen. He can smell the eggs, and he lifts himself out of the squishy couch to join her. She has a pot of coffee ready, and he pours himself some as she is busy at the stove.

“Good morning. I’m sorry if I woke you up, I didn’t think that my routine was, like, loud? This place is so creaky, you don’t realize it when you’re alone,” she offers. She’s wide awake, her green eyes are sparking with a little mischief. He smiles despite himself.

“It’s fine. I was bound to sleep terrible this first night, anyways. I usually don’t get woken up so easily.” He takes the plate of eggs and toast from her, makes his way over to the table. 

“I thought you’d have kids by now, have that reflex at the tiniest sound,” she giggles. He groans loudly, sits down and shovels a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “I’m serious!”

He rolls his eyes, ignores her bright, big smile. She wiggles her hips a little, laughs at his indignation. 

“What? You were obsessed with falling in love. It was the one thing about you that bothered me the most. But only because I wanted to fuck you so bad,” she says. He rolls his eyes again, swallows.

“Yeah, and it worked out really well for the both of us. I’m doomed to be alone forever, if you couldn’t tell. My longest relationship was five years, and then I realized that I was only with him because I was afraid to be lonely. _And_ he didn’t seem like he wanted to ask for my _hand_ anytime soon. So I didn’t see the fucking point.”

Katya is wheezing and holding onto the window frame, staring down at him with crow’s feet curling down her cheekbones. She looks beautiful. She always has been, but especially now, clearly calmer, more comfortable. She’s opened all of the windows while he was asleep, much like how she went around and methodically closed most of them the night before.

It’s like she’s more alive in the fresh air. He supposes that everyone in the world would be better for some fresh air, but she is glowing. 

The wallpaper in the kitchen is white with tiny little flowers, pink and blue and red, patterned in lines. The room glows with the morning sunshine. Brian sips his coffee, sets his mug beside the little empty vase in the middle of the table.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Katya offers, once she’s finished laughing at him. He glares at her until she laughs again, and the mood of the room has lightened by a thousand. He still feels as if he’s on shaky footing, but he feels infinitely better knowing that he can still make her laugh.

The birds in the woods around the house chirp loudly into the windows, and Brian takes it as encouragement to continue. Katya sits in the chair across from him, chewing on toast. She’s still smiling at him, watching him and his hands. It’s that gaze, the one that’s always knocked him off-center. Her pale eyes knowing him better than he’ll ever know himself, just for the privilege of seeing him outside of himself.

Or at least, her eyes make it seem as if it’s a privilege.

“I did miss you, you know? I missed you so much,” he feels like he’s beating a dead horse, a little, but her brows raise and she nods encouragingly. He takes a breath. “I never thought, back then, that I’d _not_ know you. I mean, I knew you for twelve years. That’s a long time. And the last few weren’t ideal, but. We still talked?”

He’s halting a little as he illustrates it, but her face is as kind as it’s ever been. 

“And then everyone told me you had moved, and I didn’t really know why I was the last to know. It made me feel like shit, to be honest. To find out from other people. So I didn’t call you, because I figured you wouldn’t want it.”

He thinks that maybe Katya is crying, and it’s confirmed when she looks down before he can make eye contact. She takes a heavy breath, and her hands rub over her face. Her hair is growing back a little, soft gray fuzz. She’s cut the sleeves off of an ancient Lady Bunny tee, and her collarbone is just as sharp as it’s ever been.

It’s awkward again, and he feels like he’s ruined the previous happy moment. He wishes he hadn’t, but forces himself to stay present.

“I know,” she says into her hands. “I know. I felt so bad, I’ve felt so bad ever since. And I knew, when you didn’t call me. You’ve always been the best at giving me space when I need it.”

She looks up at him, and her eyes are dry. The sun is making her irises glow.

“Like, the absolute best. You shut up, you never pushed me to do anything I didn’t want to. You advocated for me so hard at every turn, through all of it, and I abused your trust…” 

He thinks that she’s going to sob, but she takes a breath before she can. 

“I abused your trust in a way that I promised I never would. I always tried to tell you first. I guess I was just afraid of fucking leaving for real, of leaving everyone I loved in LA, and of answering to you when I knew you would question me. Because I didn’t really have a reason why, other than that I knew I had to do it,” she says. All of it in one breath, as if she’s forcing it out. 

It looks like it’s pained her, and he’s sure it has. But her discomfort soothes him. It’s their collective unhappiness that makes him feel a touch less alone. 

“Thank you,” he says. He can’t think of something else that would suffice, but he knows she’ll understand. She nods, smiles and grabs at his hand across the table. He links his fingers with hers and squeezes, nods in response.

“Do you want me to show you around? Like a proper tour?” He nods, and she pulls him from his empty plate. He doesn’t release her hand. It’s warm, and her knuckles are just as bony.

 

 

Brian finds himself two days later at a beach just a ways out of town. It’s hidden along the river, and Katya insists that nobody ever goes there but her. She makes it seem as if she tans in the nude quite often. He figures that she must really be living her best life, then.

It’s a sweltering day, and Katya is already sprawled out on her towel in the blasting sunshine by the time he’s walked down the grass from the parking lot to meet her there. A Massachusetts park is no different from a Wisconsin one, there is a little rocky pavilion in the distance, some geese have made a home in the field they drove through on the way. Brian finds a little patch of sand beneath the blotchy shade of one of the trees blocking their view from the park, and spreads his towel there.

It’s much too hot for sunbathing, but as she has always been, Katya is the exception to the rule. She’s brought a genuine wicker picnic basket filled with peanut butter sandwiches and fruit. She had forced him on a hike on his first full day visiting, and the next morning when he had slept until noon, worn out, she had gone to town to buy him beer and chocolate, two things that were both understandably and unreasonably missing from her kitchen. 

She’s brought them along, and she’s more organized than he’ll ever be. She’d waited patiently for him to slather on sunscreen before leaving, and she had sipped on sparkling lemonade the whole drive there, the windows of the car rolled down.

She gets one radio station out here, and it plays shitty 70s and 80s rock, two of his least favorite things. They create an atmosphere, though, undoubtedly, in addition to her round sunglasses and beard. She looks like a rascal, the sun has bleached what’s left blonde on her brows and chin. She has chest hair peeking out of her white t-shirt, and she’s wearing cutoff denim shorts. Her legs are just as muscular, ten times hairier. He loves it.

Brian is decidedly not an almost sixty-year-old witch. He’s gained a little bit more of a middle, he still can’t grow acceptable stubble for the life of him, and his face has thinned a bit. His sisters insist that he’s handsome, that he’s ending his forties on a high note, but he isn’t so sure. He’s just cared less as time has gone on, and he’s taken up running as a more serious hobby, too. His legs are probably more muscular now than they will ever be again, have ever been in the past.

They still haven’t talked everything out. The conversation had ended for the first time on that first morning, but he has no doubt that it will start again. He doesn’t care to rush it. He knows that in time, everything will be good between them. He hadn’t thought about coming back to visit at length, but now he is certain that he will. He doesn’t have time to lose her again. If he’s lucky, he’s halfway through his life, and they have plenty of time to shoot the shit.

Katya has pulled her t-shirt off and is lying with her bare feet resting in the sand, off the end of her towel. She still has her sunglasses on, and when he sits down on his towel she props herself up on her elbows to face him. She still shaves her armpits.

“You’re going to sit in the shade? On _my_ tanning beach?” She growls. He snorts, nods. He knows she’s rolling her eyes beneath her shades.

“It’s too fucking hot,” he insists. She shakes her head, lies back down. She’s more muscular than he even remembers her to be. She’s even veinier, and he refuses to be jealous. It’s not his fault that she’s been working out her whole life, and that now she does yoga as if her life depends on it, at fifty-six. 

He cracks a can of beer, reclines back on the towel until he’s cooled down some, and then he screws the can into the sand, stands on warm legs to join her. She’s breathing as if she’s fallen asleep, but when he stretches out beside her she slides her sunglasses off, folds them and rests them on the towel. 

“Isn’t it so nice. I found it a few years ago, I’m here like all summer.” Her voice is warmed up, where it’d been a little disused the past couple of days. She’s squinting one eye, her face turned to him. The water lapping against the shore is calming, and Brian is a little buzzed from the beer.

“It’s very nice,” he replies. She smiles, pulls her knees up. He closes his eyes, allows the sun to soak into his bare chest and thighs. The sand is very warm on the soles of his feet.

He doesn’t fall asleep, but Katya does. He lets her, until he starts to get hungry and shakes her shoulder gently. She wakes with a grunt, pulls herself up to join him in digging around in the picnic basket. 

The day goes along with more or less of the same. Katya pulls him into the cooler water of the river, water that is crystal clear but not deep enough to swim in. They sit on the rocks to cool off, water moving slowly over their knees. Katya is yawning continuously by the time the sun has begun to set, and they pack all of their things into the trunk, set off back home.

Brian is used to the limited conversation, by now. Sometimes it’s awful, and he feels as if she’s ignoring him. But he’s less interested in feeling badly, and more interested in getting her to speak more. He decides to make it something of a goal, to encourage her to babble on like he can tell she wants to. The amount of times he’s caught her closing her mouth in the past two days have been too many to count. He doesn’t care for it.

 

 

By the time that five days have passed in Katya’s house, in the summer heat that seems to be increasing with each passing moment, Brian has become impatient for action.

He’s been long-due for a vacation, and he supposes that this counts as one. But a vacation is usually relaxing, in theory, it allows for your brain to take a break alongside your physical body. This is not relaxing his mind in any sense. 

Every single night, Katya stands from the dinner table or from her chair on the porch, after they’ve been sitting for an hour watching for deer that never come, bids him goodnight, and goes up to bed. He’s been upstairs, now, and her bedroom is as messy as expected. Her sheets are white, she has a blue blanket atop them. Her bedroom is the one with the big second-floor window that looks over the front yard. The other room upstairs is used for storage (it’s a closet, he can tell. She has dresses in there, and she absolutely wears them).

It’s so quiet at night, quiet enough that he can hear his heartbeat in his chest. He doesn’t have much service, and doesn’t care to do anything on his phone. He’s cracked open a couple of books from her bookshelf, but one of them gave him nightmares, and the other was too weird to continue. He’s been too lazy to keep trying new ones.

He wouldn’t be nearly as bored if Katya would simply say what’s been on her mind this entire time. He can still see her deciding against sharing, many times a day. He’s tired of it, the back-and-forth.

By the fifth day, he’s become completely comfortable in her home, and with speaking to her. They’ve broken much of the ice that has built up over the eight years of silence. Katya talks nearly as much as she used to, pokes fun at him as she always loved to do. It’s relieving, but he knows that more is coming. He’s wishing it sooner.

He now knows that she travels into Boston to teach yoga through the winter. It made him feel better the instant she told him, because the idea of a silent winter in this house seemed unbearable. She rents an apartment in the city, and she says that the human interaction and connection in those long months is more than enough to keep her going through the summer. Sometimes her friends, usually Fena and sometimes Violet, call her landline. It hasn’t rung once in the time Brian has been over.

He suspects that she’s told everyone he will be there. He knows how everyone else will take it. He doesn’t care.

He wakes up on the fifth day ready to change something, to challenge the air of relative normalcy that they’ve created. They have another beach date planned, the July sun is beating down on the roof and making every room in the house stuffy as hell. She pulls an embroidered fan out from one of the utensil drawers, and it’s such a blast from the past that he nearly gasps at the sight.

She stocks up the picnic basket with oranges and iced tea this time, along with the peanut butter sandwiches that they’ve been living on at lunchtime. She bitches at him for five whole minutes about the heat and how much she needs to get in the water, until he finally snaps back suggesting that she take a cold shower, and that they skip the river.

It shuts her up but doesn’t stop her from laughing at him as he pulls on the shortest shorts he owns, a flimsy white tank that he doesn’t know if he’s ever washed. She keeps touching his arms, running her hands up and down them as if it’s the first time she’s ever made contact with a human being. It feels very much like she’s testing the waters.

Brian drinks beer all through the thirty minute drive to the river, and has to pee the moment they arrive. He makes the short walk to the pavillion as Katya lugs their gear to the beach. As he’s washing his hands in the dim building, he stares himself down in the mirror, straightens his back. Katya’s flighty nature is no match for his grounding capabilities. He isn’t going to let her ignore their problems today, he’s going to pry it all out of her.

When he reaches the beach she’s in her Speedo, digging her toes in the sand and staring out at the river. There was a storm upstream the night before, and while it’s sunny and overwhelmingly hot here, the water is much deeper and colder than it was on their previous visit.

The trees frame her, and his eyes regrettably go immediately to her little ass in her orange swimsuit. Her back is freckled, decorated with age spots and grooves of muscle, and her shoulders ripple as she crosses her arms. She has both towels set out beside each other, in the sunshine. 

“Hi.” He announces his arrival quietly. It feels like he’s intruding on her life, suddenly, with all of his wishes to change it, forcibly insert himself inside it. He feels like an asshole, but then she turns and she has those same eyes, staring right inside of him.

“We could really swim in this today. I’m so hot, come in with me,” she grins. He nods, pulls his shorts and shirt off, walks himself into the river before she can even lift a foot. 

He can feel his sunscreen come off as he enters, and he can feel his hot skin sting with the cold. It’s refreshing down to the bone, and she’s behind him before he can even breathe at the feeling. 

“Oh, nice,” she says. He nods, and they both sink down to their necks in the green water. The sand beneath his feet is squishy with seaweed, and the water smells like fish and Katya’s sweat. Brian closes his eyes, the sun is beating down hard on his bald head. He can’t imagine having a beard, he bets that Katya’s is just dripping with sweat.

The night before, she had leaned down beside him to help him pull the full bag out of the trash, and her cheek had scraped against his shoulder. He had held in his shiver, but he knows she heard his teeth snap together in lieu of a gasp. It’s that tension, the misplaced kind he’s felt since that first text, that he wants to break apart into a trillion pieces.

They’re completely alone on what Katya said is supposed to be the hottest day of July. Brian’s arms are keeping him afloat underwater and his fingers brush up against Katya’s side. She squeals like he’s tickled her, and he laughs in her face. He can see that her nose is already burnt.

Katya is spending a lot of time underwater. Brian can’t help but assume that it’s in avoidance. He does the same, lets the water fill up his ears, releases his breath to sink to the bottom. 

When he comes back up, Katya is standing over him with a curious look. Her sharp nose is dripping water from the bridge, and her eyes are squinting up at him once he straightens to his full height.

“I thought maybe you had died,” she mumbles. He laughs at her, pulls on her right earlobe, and ignores the shudder that climbs up his arm. She turns with a little smile, walks back slowly to the beach, lands on her towel.

He follows her because he doesn’t have much else to do. He pours himself iced tea in a cup she’s brought from her kitchen, a scraped up pink plastic one. He looks over to her face, damp with sunglasses covering her eyes. She’s looking up at him, he can see her eyes through the tinted glass. He looks down, to her chest that’s dripping with river water, across the blonde and gray hair there. 

He’s never seen her like this, hairy and in her full element of humanity. Swimming in freshwater, reaching over his body to take an orange from the basket. He’s staring at her dick, at her blonde pubes that are curling out of her suit, parts of her body he’s never wanted to touch or put his mouth to.

But she’s just dripping everywhere, her skin is golden and shining. He wants to wipe his fingers across her scalp, maybe, to dry her head off. Little rivers are coming down her forehead and pooling at her brows. Her knees crack as she sits up, to level the playing field.

She bites into the skin of the orange to get her peeling started, and drops the chunks she pulls off between her legs on the towel. Brian feels like he has sand everywhere, probably does from sitting on the bottom of the river. Orange juice is dripping down over her lips, her beard looks sticky.

He kisses her over the orange in her hands, grabs both of her cheeks with his damp palms. She snuffles, makes a grunt of surprise, and then she kisses him back, harder, drops her orange in the sand between them as she kneels.

His hands are on her hairy, dripping thighs, and her hands move to his back, where she digs her fingers and clasps both of his shoulder blades. Her mouth is as hot as the air around them, he’s beginning to melt in the humidity, the sun, the water still drying on his body.

Her face scrapes his, her beard is sharp and uncomfortable but it also makes his dick twitch, his fingers grip onto her hips and his lips widen, allow her tongue inside his mouth. The citrus flavor of her tongue and teeth makes him squirm, and the little joyful noises she’s making cause him to fall forward onto her.

“Fuck,” he whispers into her mouth. She grips behind his knee, pulls him further atop her, takes both of his buttcheeks in her hands, slaps down on them once so he accidentally bites down on her tongue.

They both moan loudly, and Brian can feel the orange squeezing juice out beneath his thigh, squished between it and the sand. Katya breaks their lips apart to rub her entire face across his neck, all of their skin sticking together. It’s the most physically uncomfortable Brian has ever been making out with someone, but he has never been so hard, has never wanted anyone to fuck him and squeeze his belly more.

She brings her sticky lips back to his after she’s done burning the skin of his throat and shoulders. She kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him, holding onto him everywhere she can get her hands. She stops short of his dick, grabs onto his ears, bashes her teeth against his in an anxiety-inducing moment. He scrapes his nails along her cheeks, against her coarse beard and then up below her eyes, where he places gentle fingerprints along her sunburn.

When he finally feels as if he’s caught his footing, he pulls back from her and ignores how her lips follow him greedily. He places his right thumb on them, and she kisses it, her lips covered in his saliva all over his finger, sliding up and down. 

They’re both breathing heavily, and Katya’s eyes are so heavy-lidded that he can’t make eye contact with her until she regains her breath. She blinks rapidly, nods, stands on shaky legs that nearly give out beneath her. She holds onto his shoulders for balance, and once she obtains it she’s folding up her towel, stuffing it into her bag, slinging the brown canvas strap over her shoulder. He follows a bit slower, lifts the picnic basket to follow her dutifully to the car.

She drives them back silently, in just her Speedo. He’s half-dressed, and he can’t stop his hand from stroking the back of her neck over and over again. She has goosebumps there, and he pokes them gently. She keeps sighing, long swaths of air releasing from her nose. The radio is turned up too loud, and the wind whips against his cheeks.

He leans over as she turns up her road, runs his nose up and down her cheek. He can see her knuckles whiten around the steering wheel. He opens his lips against where her beard tapers off into soft skin, licks along her face gently, and she’s stopping with a halt in the yard.

She unbuckles and stares him down, watches his every move as he rises from his seat and shuts the door in her face. And then she’s hot on his heels on the way to the front door, that she’s locked for the first time since he came.

Her hands are on his waist, her chin set on his shoulder, peering over to unlock the door as he presses his right hand to her cheekbone. She’s hot on his back, her hand is stretched across his chest. She pushes the door open wide just as her hand moves down to hold his dick through his shorts.

She releases him, ignoring his grunt, gently places both of her palms on his back to guide him up the stairs. 

Before he can register it, she’s got him naked in the shower and is covering him in some kind of biodegradable, minty body wash. She’s running her hands up and down his arms, slower than honey, breathing into his face. He feels dizzy from the heat and from the warm water raining down on his head. 

She’s making little noises still, a continuous monologue of them, into his ears. There’s a privacy glass window in the shower, and the sun coming in lights up her body. She holds him by his armpits, kisses him slower than he can stand. 

They don’t speak, other than broken moans and breathing. Brian wishes he could open his mouth, but he’s too caught up in touching Katya, her soft skin that’s even softer at her stomach and ass. He’s too entranced with the way that she trails her hot mouth down his chest, how his skin burns and scrapes red, how her back ripples beneath the water.

When they’re both clean from the freshwater to Katya’s desires, her fingers all over him swirling bubbles and scrubbing him clean, her fingers up his ass and down his legs, she turns off the water with a squeak of the handle. The quiet that remains is still stark to Brian, who has become so used to living in the city, having at least the low hum of the street outside his empty house.

His entire body is thrumming with energy. His skin is alive with the awareness that Katya is all over him, that her familiar frame with so many edits from the years is still present, and that she’s naked in front of him, breathing in deeply and propping his chin in her hands, kissing him again.

He is the first to climb out of the shower, to grab a soft blue towel and wrap it around her chiseled shoulders, over her freckled back and chest. He towels her down and she watches him with almost tired eyes, the wrinkles around them softened and calm. She looks the least guarded he’s ever seen her. 

He feels vaguely as if his entire body is culminating at his dick, that his heart is beating there, that he’s maybe crying a little bit there, that his back is arching just for his dick wanting to be touching Katya’s skin. When he straightens from toweling her down with a grunt, a cracking knee, her arms are twisting around his again, her hands holding his elbows and her lips finding his again.

She yanks him hard to bed. She rests his back against the sheets, kisses both of his nipples and crumples against him, her weight knocking all of the wind out of him. She’s strong, heavier than she ever was when she was on a diet of eat-when-you-can, but he can still lift her off of him, coax her to his side. 

She kisses all along his spine, makes like she wants to press her dry lips to each and every last vertebrae. He whines through each and every kiss, every scrape and scratch of Katya’s blunt fingernails across his back. She keeps resting her body over his, her wiry chest hair tickling his armpits and waist. His dick aches as it gets pressed into the bed.

She slaps his ass twice, once on either side, bites right above where the curve of it begins and holds her teeth there, until he cries out, releases before the skin turns numb. His eyes are shut tight, but he opens them as she’s cracking the lube open, curling a hand around his hip to flip him over.

Her eyes water at the sight of his dick, her fingers fumble on the lube. Her knuckles are bigger, the tendons in her hairy arms are twisting and meeting her veins deliciously, and he reaches up to wipe the drool from the corners of his mouth.

Her dick is curved up, reaching and slick, and her little tummy is wrinkling and bending as she leans forwards, and she cries out in surprise as he pulls her in to kiss her again. 

It’s the closest either of them have come to talking, Brian feels as if he’s got a gag on. She’s breathing heavily into his mouth, hot air slipping across his teeth and dripping out over his lips. Her cock bumps up against his, and it’s like a hot spike is shoved through his stomach, and her hands move to grab the both of them, to jerk them together. He’s counting the age spots on her shoulders, watching her waist bend.

Before he can breathe, before he can catch his mind from running off and leaving him completely, she’s stuffed him full of three fingers, and he’s sweating and groaning as her long fingers are moving inside of him. He wants to kiss her again, but her scratchy beard is rubbing against his inner thigh as she watches her own handiwork.

He clenches his thighs, and she opens her mouth to kiss where her head was lying, digs her front teeth into his skin. 

As she covers her dick in lube, ignoring his hand messing around with the hair of her upper thigh, yanking and rubbing up and down, up and down, they make eye contact and Katya gasps. And then her dick is pushing inside of him, and he’s filled up more than he’s ever been, with twenty years of waiting and confusion stuffed inside him, to the hilt. 

She grips both of his ass cheeks, pulls them apart, dirty and growling, to stuff herself further inside, fucks him with a force that should not exist in a fifty-six year old woman, slams against his prostate until he takes both of her shoulders in hand with a sob, and she lowers his back onto the bed, starts to pump into him slower, quieter.

“Trixie.” She states it, like she’s always wanted to babble it over and over, but she can’t in the moment. She says it like it’s the last word she’ll ever say, jaw clenched and teeth snapping together. He takes her tight jaw in hand, feeling her inside him so hot and deep, consuming. He pulls her face to his, close enough that they can maintain eye contact, too far to kiss.

Their stomachs touch, trapping his dick in a hot vice, and he moans so loudly as she bottoms out inside him once again that she collapses all of her weight on him once more. She drops her elbows on either side of his head, kisses him with her hot, open mouth. She tastes like soap, her beard smells like soap as it scratches his nose. She rests her cheek against his, lifts her stomach, takes his dick in her hand to match the rhythm of her fucking.

He comes as she comes, choking on her beard, lips wobbling against her soft earlobe. She comes with all of her fingers digging into his armpits, her feet squished beneath his thighs. 

 

 

Katya’s white sheets are freshly washed, and Brian wraps himself up in them as Katya vapes out the window. He hopes that she’s naked more often now that her dick’s been in his ass, hopes and dreams that her little ass will be a sight he becomes used to. He has a premonition that it will be, based on how she keeps pulling her head back out of the window to grin at him.

He can’t stop remembering her twenty years ago and contrasting the two women, as if they’re completely different. She’s heavier, stronger, and older. She’s more blonde, and the whole of her seems to be one color, honey and sunshine, gold in the sunlight. She smells like the Burt’s Bees lotion he’s spotted on her bedside table, cocoa butter and some other milky something. She has wrinkles, real ones that are just as sweet as her crow’s feet were ten years ago, but that insist on their permanence.

Once she pulls herself inside she climbs back onto the bed and rests one leg across his stomach, over the starchy white sheet. He watches her stomach rise and fall, lets her hold his hand tightly. Breaking the silence seems impossible, he can feel the blockage in his throat where the words would come out. Thankfully, ever perceptive, she breaks it for the both of them.

“This is the best I’ve ever felt here,” she says. He doesn’t understand what she means, waits for an explanation. The window is wide open, and her toes are curling at the end of the bed. “You being here too.”

He wants to hurl, but takes a breath to dissipate the feeling. Her eyes are closed, and she moves her head so that her cheek is resting on his bare shoulder. He closes his own, tries to do the calming breaths she taught him so long ago. Her hand presses into his stomach and releases in tandem with his breath, as if she knows exactly what he’s attempting. It isn’t working, but after a few minutes of heavy silence he opens his eyes again.

“And I’ve felt bad here, but never as bad as in LA. Or in Boston, or on the road. It’s been so much better. It’s stupid, but having everything I could ever need to be stable, and happy, and whatever, and having you too…” She does a lot of trailing off, more than she ever used to. He knows that it’s because she’s more in her head. Her words fill him up to the brim with satisfaction, pride that brings him back to his twenties again.

But he isn’t in his twenties. He’s rounding off forty, and he has plenty to show for it. He’s spent a lot of time in the nights in Katya’s living room thinking about his life, his current single status, where he’s at, and he’s happy with it. He could die tomorrow and be immensely satisfied with himself, and he thinks that this is what lent him the ability to take a risk he hasn’t allowed himself to previously consider, for twenty whole years.

It’s been a long five days, the longest of his life. Every day drags out into oblivion, silence, and sunshine. It’s agonizing sometimes, especially when Katya is asleep, or takes a two-hour yoga and meditation break out of nowhere. But he’s less flighty than he used to be, and she’s more intense than she’s ever been before.

“It is stupid.” Katya’s head lifts from his shoulder, her eyes are clear with understanding and a tiny bit of disappointment. “But I get it. I feel so fucking old in West Hollywood, I feel like I’ve been living there a hundred years, girl. But being here feels like I haven’t aged a day, since we first started hanging out.”

Katya smiles, her eyes crinkle. She kisses him, and he kisses her back harder than he meant to. Her mouth wants him to, to tear her the fuck apart and bite her lips. She starts to turn over, more of her weight resting on him, but he pulls back and kisses the side of her mouth, bristles pricking his numb lips.

“You aren’t old, you know? You’re young, and sexy, I could touch you all over for hours and hours, and still not be satisfied. You’re so hot, I want to fuck you again,” she mumbles against his cheek. The clock insists that it’s only four, but it feels like midnight. He groans as she lands completely on top of him. Both of them are soft, Brian’s too fucking old to go again, despite how Katya’s words are making his mouth water. He has nine days left here, and five days has felt like two years. It’s more than enough time.

Katya makes pancakes for dinner, pours him iced coffee in a big mug that has the insignia of her yoga studio plastered on. He sips it as he watches her, in her denim cutoffs and ridiculous sunglasses, vaping at the griddle, flipping the pancakes over and over. She blows smoke to the ceiling, and he watches the line of her throat extend.

The sun is setting, and the kitchen is filled with long shadows. Katya’s torso stretches along the walls, Brian sits facing into the kitchen with his bare feet flat on the floor. She munches on strawberries and blackberries as she piles the plate full of pancakes, some massive and some laughably small. Her lips stain purple, and his gut swoops at the tint, so close to when she would be in high-whore getup, in basement lighting, hands on his lap.

She serves him three pancakes, and as she does so he reaches to her chest to run his hand through her chest hair, make a fist and pull for a brief moment. She whines, kisses him once, cradling his fist in both of her hands. Her sunglasses bump his nose, dig into his cheeks. 

He releases her and she sits, cheeks red, across from him. She pulls her sunglasses off and he snorts at the sunburn that’s manifested in a line above her brows. She scowls at him and digs in to her own pancakes, ignoring his laughter. But when he reaches his hand across the table, she takes it in her own. It’s uncomfortable pouring syrup and cutting pancakes into edible pieces while holding hands, but Katya laughs obnoxiously and beautifully when he spills syrup off the edge of his plate. 

After they finish, Katya spends fifteen minutes trying to kill a fly that she swears is out to get her, looking ridiculous with her patterned sunburn and faded cutoffs that he swears will fall apart at any second. She monologues at length about how she wants to light a fire in the fireplace, and he needs to talk her down from it because of the heat, despite her insistence that he’ll love to see it.

And Brian doesn’t even make a move to his couch bed, simply follows Katya up the stairs to her room once they begin yawning in tandem. She looks to him in mild confusion, but he closes their lips together in a warm kiss, and she pulls him up the stairs before he can plead his case. 

“Don’t let me wake you up in the morning,” she grumbles as he lies on top of the blankets. It’s grown too hot for even a sheet, he’s sweltering at the highest point in Katya’s house, briefly wonders if they should move downstairs for the temperature factor. 

But she’s asleep before he can bring it up, and he resigns himself to sleep in the heat. He sinks into the soft pillow, and Katya’s breathing sings him into a deep, dreamless nothing.

 

 

The next day, Katya kneels on the kitchen floor, still dripping sweat from her morning yoga, and sucks him off loudly, choking him down as far as she can, kissing along his cock and holding both of his hands as she holds her breath. He returns the favor before she can sneak into the shower, so he can smell and taste every sweaty inch of her. He kisses along her ass, licking across both cheeks and stuffing his face against her balls as he jerks her off, then sucking her down and drooling onto the floor until she comes.

She’s lazy with her morning orgasm, convinces Brian to lie in the backyard on towels instead of at the beach. She doesn’t want to make the drive, not even when he offers to drive, instead.

He’s glad to stay back at the house, especially when she brings out the fruit from the refrigerator and pushes cold berries past his lips, keeps her fingers in his mouth as he chews them and sucks the juice off of them when she pulls them out. The sky is so blue that the clouds look pink, and the air is thick with Katya’s naked body in the sunshine, his own bare hips bumping against hers.

She insists on putting on his sunscreen, now that they’re “past fourth-base,” spends a prolonged amount of time rubbing the lotion into his chest, his back, his legs and ass. He kneels beside her, kisses up both of her strong, hairy legs, until he reaches her dick. He rests his cheek against it, stuffs his nose in her gray blonde curls and breathes in, the smell of her skin, her dick, her ass.

By the time afternoon slides along, she’s sleeping on his chest, and they’re covered by the shade of one of the many pine trees circle the small patch of grass that makes up her yard. There is a slow breeze that cuts the heat of the day, supported by the shade. She’s snoring, and Brian can feel himself drifting off. His ears are ringing with sleep, and Katya’s weight on top of him is comforting. 

He wakes up not long after, and Katya’s green eyes are closing in to kiss him again.

 

 

The rest of his visit goes much faster than the beginning, when he was wishing the awkwardness away. It’s painful, how quickly the days fly by, when all he wants to do is curl up on Katya’s chest and kiss her, when the only thing he wishes to feel is her warm skin, her beard on his asshole. 

She cries once, on a night when he’s buzzed on wine and she’s vaping carelessly in the living room. She’s lit incense, and the lights are down low. He’s tinkering away on her piano that came with the place. It was covered with a tapestry when he arrived, and she had unveiled it as if she had expected him to serenade her. He doesn’t know much piano, but he tries his best.

She’s drinking peach sparkling juice, and when she kisses him her tongue is tangy. The room seems smaller with her legs sprawled, hanging over the back of the couch, her head dangling off the seat. She’s holding the pillow he had previously slept on with both of her arms around her middle, and she’s exhaling smoke everywhere. He’s getting dizzy.

The room looks purple because Katya’s draped the tapestry that was previously keeping the piano hidden over the lamp in the corner. Her skin is shining in the dim light, and when he looks back at her in the middle of singing one of his older songs, _Two Birds_ old, she has big tears tracking down her cheeks. His hands land on the keys, making an ugly sound that rebounds through his swirling skull.

“Kat-”

“Don’t stop, don’t be stupid. Don’t look at me!” She squeals jokingly. He obeys, gives her her space. He doesn’t know if she wants space. He isn’t sure that she’s ever wanted the space she’s asked for. He’ll always give it to her.

He keeps playing, even though he doesn’t know the song. He’s making up lyrics he’s never sung before, and he can’t hear them over the loudness of Katya’s muffled crying. His hands shake at the keys, and eventually he can hear her sit up and walk over to him, barefoot. Her arms slip around his middle and squeeze his stomach, and his neck grows wet with her salty tears. 

She kisses the back of his neck, licks over his skin and sucks up her tears as he plays. He shuffles on the seat, the permanent beard burn between his legs bothersome. She hums along, sniffles over his shoulder, sits next to him and climbs half into his lap. The piano bench creaks dangerously, her bare feet rub up and down his calves.

She fucks him slowly the night she cries, three days until he is due to leave. He grunts into the pillow as she slides in and out of him, freezing hands on his biceps. He thinks about how he wants to ask her to stay, but can’t tell if she wants him to.

 

 

The heatwave continues until the penultimate day, when the clouds that have been gathering through the night break open into a trillion pieces, slam onto Katya’s roof in the early morning, loudly. Brian wakes up alone in Katya’s bed, and knows he won’t be able to fall asleep again, like she always prompts him to.

He descends the stairs and flicks on the kitchen light, starts the coffee. He doesn’t think that the noise will be too much over the cracking thunder for Katya’s morning meditation. As he pours himself some in his designated mug and pads over to the table, he catches a glimpse of Katya, legs stacked atop each other, arms behind her back, eyes closed.

He’s never seen her so still, but for her stomach, that’s expanding and contracting with sufficient drama. She has all of the candles lit, on the windowsills, and behind them the streaks of rain on the glass, still pounding and increasing with the storm, are striped with flickering gold. He feels as if he’s intruding on something much too private, but after ten minutes of complete stillness her eyes open, and she smiles at him.

He smiles back, waves like an idiot, and she bursts into laughter. A loud thunderclap makes him jump, and she wheezes on and on. 

“Come here,” she calls him. He stands, obeys, walks into her private little room. She had the door open, though, as if she was waiting for him, and she’s pointing to the corner of the room. His eyes follow her tanned finger, and he grabs another mat that’s rolled up in a little pile of them. “Roll it out, sit down.”

Her voice is smooth and calm, her face is lit beautifully by the candles. His breaths are lengthening just by virtue of being near her, and she momentarily brings her warm hands to his legs to position him comfortably.

“Eyes closed,” she whispers. He regrettably shuts them, on Katya’s chiseled, blushing face, on her bare chest and beard, on her sharp nose that’s casting a shadow on her cheek. “Breathe in, and try to smooth out your breath. I can hear how it’s rough, try and keep it linear. And out, release slowly.”

He follows her, and eventually her hands move away from his knees. She instructs him to listen to the rain, to listen to the noises around them, to name them in his mind. His eyes flicker open sometimes, to her relaxed face, her shiny eyelids, to a bead of sweat dripping down her forehead. But he closes them, insists that they be heavy for her.

She brings him back with hands on his feet, rubbing circles, and then to his calves, squeezing his knees. She has him stand and follow her through some poses, has him press his back against her own for five minutes straight, just breathing, until their breaths connect and become one.

It takes him until the late afternoon of the same day to ask her if she wants him to stay. He curls up on the couch with her, beneath a blanket with a big hole in it that she’s patched with denim. She’s telling him the storyline of one of her favorite books excitedly, and his mind is quieter than it’s been in years. His body is too, he feels warm, less uncomfortable on the squishy couch. 

“Katya,” he says. She stops, raises her eyebrows curiously. He smiles, can’t stop himself, because he’s just realized the magnitude of meeting her again. Meeting her again didn’t mean immediately slotting back into their old roles, continuing as it had once gone. Instead, it had meant this, sitting with her in the middle of the woods with a real fire in the fireplace, finally, just quietly. And it was the perfect timing.

“Yeah? Trixie, what’s up?” He’s shifted his gaze to the staircase. She looks behind her shoulder, sees nothing, and it gives him a moment to gather himself.

“Would you have me here? Like, until the day I die,” he asks. She’s confused, but then she grins, so wide that he can see every single white tooth. 

“Yeah, I would,” she says. And then she launches back into her story, waving her hands a little more joyfully this time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY I WASN'T DONE- thanks everyone for giving this story the biggest Hello and Welcome any of my fics have ever gotten! This is more of a summary of their lives onward, a shorter chapter, little moments that make up the Winter, with a dash of what it's like to be in love with someone who is mentally ill- not every fic gets that shit right! All of it is too dramatic! I really hoped to make it real here. This is more trixie-centric, because I wanted to give more of a perspective from afar of everything, if that makes sense. much like the first chapter, I wrote all of this in a manic obsession- and much like Katya's knitting abilities in this chapter, I think it's not half bad! nothing too thrilling, but hopefully something nice to get us all prepped for our upcoming seasonal depression. Oh that's just me? Well,
> 
> Thank you all for reading, you can find me on tumblr @ ourladykatya. Come say hello! Hope U enjoy.

The January of Katya’s winter yoga residency is long and nearly unbearable.

After moving in with her permanently in August and then living with her full-time through the end of the summer, the fall, and now through some of the winter, Brian is completely happy with his decision to stay. He had wrangled a collective Christmas somehow, both of their families stuffed in the rented two-bedroom Boston apartment for two nights. 

Katya had cooked everything, had insisted on doing so, only letting him check on the ham every once in a while as she dusted the windowsills. She had fed everyone like a proper hostess, had made extra-certain that everyone was happy and that the kids settled down for bed at a decent hour. He had hated how often it made him cry.

It’s been better than Brian could have ever expected for the both of them. He feels like a real adult for the first time in his life, can look in the mirror and tell himself that he’s retired, that he’s done it at a relatively young age, and that he’s hopefully only set up for comfort and happiness, from now forward.

But January is where it becomes nasty, with the short, dark days that whip Katya up into a frenzy, her even earlier bedtime hardly working and his own sleep suffering because of it. He tries his absolute hardest to entertain her, to encourage her on winter runs with him in the park near the apartment. She goes along with it to a point, pretends to be patient, until she turns to yelling at the news and random reality TV to release all of her pent-up energy.

He’s surprised at first, because she spends at least eight hours a day at the studio. He can’t imagine that she could possibly not be sedated after hours and hours of classes, but she isn’t. He doesn’t know how to handle it, even though he used to handle it in much larger quantities years ago. It’s a residual fear of stepping over a line, a line he’s drawn up, imagining that she would be angry with him if he crossed it.

He tries to convince himself that the reality of their relationship is far off from those fears, and it leads him to plotting. She’s fast asleep at eight am, something that does not happen in the summer but is typical in the winter on days off, when he decides on the plan. 

He wakes her gently, because if he doesn’t she’ll be jumping out of bed at a speed he cannot handle. He gives her a half a cup of coffee, and she latches herself to him under the sheets, beard tickling his neck and bare stomach rising and falling against his hip. She’s quiet, and it’s making him nervous. He kisses her cool ear over and over, his lips getting a respite from the furnace heat of the rest of her naked body.

The apartment is much less creaky than their house, and it’s almost spooky to Brian. The cars that consistently pass outside aren’t the same as the groans and twists of the old house, and it keeps him awake from morning until night. It feels lonelier in the city, for some reason.

She finally starts speaking, and is rambling about the show she started watching last night as he encourages her up and out of bed. She chews around a scone as she tells him all about each and every shitty housewife she can name, and details the ones she can’t with a flitting hand that nearly hits him multiple times. 

She squishes him up against the counter and makes out with him, her coffee breath filling his mouth and her sharp teeth biting his lips. His stubble and her beard make little scraping noises against each other, and she does some deep sighing into him, stretches her arms far out from her shoulders and grips her hands in fists as she kisses him. She had him do a similar stretch once, and he had been able to feel all of the tendons in his hands screaming in pain.

“You have something to say,” she snaps once she pulls back. He raises his eyebrows, his stomach delights at how she treats him like her old husband, already.

“I thought we could go shopping today,” he says. She’s smirking at his words, as if she knew he would say them. It’s like the night they first hung out, in the low buzz of a hotel room, at three in the morning, when he had been trying in near-sleep to describe something and she had finished his entire thought lazily. It hadn’t even been his first experience with her witchery. Her cheeks are a little red, and he wonders what she thinks they’re shopping for.

“Okay,” she giggles. He can’t help but worry that he’s gotten himself into something, that she’s tricking him despite being in the dark herself. “Where?”

Her little pink underwear are falling down one of her hips- she’s lost weight over the winter instead of gained it, another cause for his needless worry. She’s been teaching so often that it was bound to happen, he’s just primed to worry about her always, he supposes. The worry feels old and worn, it being the same monster he encountered years ago. It’s manageable, but almost constantly there. It’s overflowing with love, and his heart speeds up at her blush. 

“Just Target. The usual,” he shrugs. She laughs, twirls a little to turn back around, to the bathroom. She winks at him before closing the door, and she showers without him, taking next to no time. She comes back out with her body shining and moisturized, and she spanks him on his way in after her.

She’s lit a stupid scented candle in the bathroom, and he hates to love it sitting on the edge of the tub for his shower. He can hear her fidgeting around in the apartment outside, ignores her shouted affirmations that she’s just fine, tries to let the water pounding his skull relax him.

The tension has reached a peak, and he’s all too aware that they haven’t fucked in more than two weeks. It’s completely out of the ordinary for them, and he hates it. The time his shower gives him to be physically separate from her cements his decision to shake all of it up, this supposed new routine that involves a lot of laziness on both of their parts. 

Once he blows out the candle and exits the bathroom, she’s spread across the living room rug, eyes slid closed and hands on her stomach and heart. He quietly drinks another cup of coffee as he waits for her to finish up, and when she sits back up and grins at him he nods to the bedroom, gesturing for her to get dressed.

She comes out in typical fashion, scarf looped three times around her neck and black hoodie pocket stretching with her phone. She’s in black jeans, and her green patterned socks are rolled up over them. He watches her pull on her sneakers and they leave the kitchen light on, in case it snows. 

He drives the both of them to Target- an empty parking lot full of his choice of space, and ignores Katya’s fingers pinching his earlobe. She’s started wearing earrings every day, and she has little silver hoops in. She kisses his cheek as he turns the car off, and he grips both of her hands in his own to give her a real kiss, ten full seconds of cold lips and tongue before unbuckling. 

“Can I know what you want me in? Are you going to buy me a dress? I know I didn’t bring any and I wouldn’t be angry if you wanted me in one, it’s just so cold.” She slips her hand into the crook of his elbow and has him guide her to the front door. A kid is mopping the entrance, a kid that Brian recognizes from previous trips. He nods in greeting, and Katya keeps talking. 

“That’s okay. No, it’s too cold.” he affirms. She nods, squeezes his arm and gasps at a stack of floral printed plates. He rolls his eyes, drags her along to the women’s section, fielding constant questioning and berating about how awful of a husband he is, loud and joking so that everyone fucking stares. He’s shaking his head repeatedly as she monologues, until her voice trails off as they come up to the lingerie, or whatever Target considers to be lingerie.

She knew, and he knew she knew. They haven’t talked about her persistent womanhood at length since he’s moved in, but he can tell that she’s been chomping at the bit to get back into the groove of it, now that she has someone other than herself to perform it for.

It drives him insane, when she’ll drape a leg daintily over his as they sit on the couch, curled up together after a long day of nothingness, watching a movie halfheartedly. He’s lived with her for enough months to understand that she hasn’t changed much at all, her core is still the same as it’s always been. And he can feed that, he knows what she wants, possibly even before she does.

A year into their friendship, Katya had called him at five in the morning to come to her hotel room. Brian had been there in five minutes, bleary-eyed and in ill-fitting pajamas. She had stood in a nightgown and had danced filthily for him as he sat on the bed, and he had been too tired to even consider being turned on. She had dug her nails into his shoulders and kissed his forehead with red lips, and had sent him back to bed with a light tap on the ass.

Months later, when he had remembered the incident, he had needed to excuse himself from his boyfriend’s arms on the couch to jerk off anxiously in the bathroom.

Katya knows exactly what she’s doing, her cheeks are red from the cold and she waltzes between the racks, turning to stare him down, question why he’s still standing stupidly in the aisle.

“I have these beautiful tits at home, I wish I had brought them,” she says. He’s glad she hasn’t brought them, since the situation has escalated to its full capacity in mere seconds, when he was just hoping to get her into a bra and panties so she would finally have a satisfying orgasm. It needs to be simple and effective, they can go all out when summer comes around again.

And then her lips are hot on his earlobe, her lips wet with spit and her hand squeezing his waist.

“I almost saved up for real ones, but I realized that fake are just as good. Even better,” she whispers. He grunts, pats her shoulder like a dumbass, and then she’s gone just as quickly, and his vision returns as she begins digging through a rack beside him.

She hums as she peruses the bralettes, and her fingers choose a navy blue one, a red one, and a black one that match in style almost immediately.

“God, I have so many at home, are we wasting doing this? Wasting resources? Money? No, don’t answer that, I don’t care,” she says. He nods, stands and watches with the red basket she’s filling steadily hanging in his right hand. They could drive back, get a load of her clothes and undergarments to amuse her, but it isn’t worth it, not now that she’s ten times more impatient since she’s found a point of focus. He has no desire to be on a two hour car ride with her in the driver’s seat.

She spends a lot of time analyzing underwire and push-up bras, eventually deciding against a hot pink one that he rather liked. She picks A cups, tiny ones that will fit just against her chest, and when she wore them in the past he never thought it could be this sexy. Her outfit is so fucking casual, with a touch of drama in the scarf and socks, and he just wants to have her on the floor, kissing him everywhere.

She makes little exclamations over the garments, whispering to him that this one is really cute or do you want to see my ass in this? He tries to respond accordingly, but his mind is boggled with the efficiency and focus her shopping takes. 

And then she’s leaving him in the dust on her way to the changing rooms, his feet shuffling along the aisle to catch up with her.

“Babe- can you-” she’s disappeared before he can get her attention. Thankfully, there isn’t a forlorn teenager working at the desk that’s situated to the side of the ugly row of fitting rooms with bright red doors.

His knees ache in the winter, it’s something that he hadn't learned in his middle age in Los Angeles. He’s learned it quickly in Boston, though. He sits at the chair in the little fitting room alcove gratefully, thankful that Katya snatched the basket out of his arm before she went and locked herself into a fitting room. 

He can hear her, in a fitting room not far from his chair, can see her taking her shoes off from under the door. 

“What were you asking me?” She calls. He responds that it was nothing, encourages her to try everything on as quickly as she can, so that they can hurry up and get home. 

“Can I-” she cuts him off with a _No!_ before he can finish the thought. He hates just how well she knows him, wishes she would lay off for a minute so he could get a word in more. She coughs, and then the door opens a small crack, two fingers slipping out to beckon him inside. He laughs loudly at the absurdity, earning a loud shush from inside the room.

He squeezes in beside her, ever thankful that the Target is deserted. He swallows his nervous energy down, his hands go to her bare, sloped waist before he can control his lizard brain. She’s wearing a pair of red high waisted panties, matching lacy bralette soft against her chest and shoulders. Her hands push his hands off of her, and he grunts as she guides him down onto the little red stool in the corner.

She’s posing for the mirror, running her hands over her ass in the panties and squeezing her right tit. He lowers his eyes to the ground, controls himself, before she’s pulling off the panties. She seems satisfied that the size is correct, and she spends the rest of the time sorting through the rest of the items, picking the correct sizes and stuffing the others in Brian’s arms.

She’s humming as she gets redressed, gripping the handle of the basket in her cold fingers, squeezing past him to exit the fitting room. He hangs each and every reject on the rack outside, her foot tapping obnoxiously on the tile floor as she waits for him.

She leads him to the makeup section, pushing speeds that he finds obnoxious, her skinny legs with the added spring in her step sending him to the brink. He’s sweating by the time they reach the lipstick.

Katya bites her bottom lip as she scans her options, and Brian covertly scans also, because he can feel her complaints about the selection coming from a mile away. Before he can offer a suggestion of a nice, matte red, she’s picking the same one off of the shelf, with a typical purple liner. He snorts, ignores her hard poke of his shoulder.

Brian pays, because he knows she’ll be pissed about how much everything costs with the mood she’s been in. It isn’t as expensive as he had thought, but it’s still a price that makes him sigh, knowing she has drawers full of everything at home. Katya watches him swipe his card with a smirk, winks obnoxiously as the young teen girl ringing them up insists that they have a great night.

They’re hardly on day one of Katya’s two full days off, and Brian is about to combust at her constant knee-shuffling in the passenger seat. It’s begun to snow, and Brian takes the long way to the café, hoping to feed the both of them before the situation becomes dire.

“Will you get me a chai? And a sandwich. I really need to eat something, Trix. I’m starving,” she says over the low hum of the radio. He nods, pulling into the empty parking lot. She follows him in, and he sees her lingering at the door for a moment, longing for her vape, which he knows is sitting on the kitchen table, forgotten in the excitement.

Brian orders, and they eat, Katya finishing her sandwich and salad long before Brian is through with half of his. She hums and plays with his bag of chips, twisting in her seat to see if they sell ice cream in January. 

Once they are both full, and Katya has finished her strawberry ice cream, they jump in the car to head home. She is all the more amped, but is hiding her excitement, he can only assume it’s for his benefit. She knows that he gets tired of the mania quickly, sees his every deep breath and fond but tired smiles. She has a hand on his knee, though, and he puts his own over it, scratching at the hair on her knuckles.

Katya disappears into the bathroom once they get home. He knows she’ll be a while, takes the blessed silence with relief. He watches the news on mute, so that she doesn’t feel compelled to give her two cents, if she were to hear it. He can hear bangs and muffled curses from inside the bathroom, ignores them for the slow sleepiness that is spreading in his head.

And then there are palms on both of his ears, fingers tugging at his earlobes to wake him up. The TV has been turned off, and Katya is behind him. He can smell her perfume, tilts his head back to take in her hard red lips through her scruffy beard. He can smell the hard scent of nail polish as well, on the fingers right beside his nose.

She’s changed earrings, into dangling gold pieces with cheap red jewels in them. She comes around the couch, grinning, and she’s wearing the red bra with the million straps and some little silver hook clasps in the front, high-waisted underwear with two side panels of mesh. She’s painted her fingers and toes a matching red, and he holds out both of his hands to take hers in them.

He kisses the backs of her hands, her sharp knuckles and small wrists. She gasps a little, and it causes him to grip her waist with both hands, pull her onto his lap, kiss her until all of her lipstick is staining her beard red. 

When she comes, he holds her tightly, and after watches her eyes grow pleasantly tired. Later, he watches her do a slow flow on the living room floor, in front of the fireplace, and then they both sleep soundly, Katya in a new pair of red floral pajama shorts.

 

 

Katya’s skin is more pink and white than golden in the winter- she has given up on spray tans and shitty lotion, and Brian is all the luckiest man in the world for it. He can happily trace each vein up her legs on January evenings, the gas fireplace something he never thought he would rely on so much for both atmosphere and warmth. 

Katya naked in living rooms has become something of Brian’s sweetest daydreams. Sometimes she is naked on her yoga mat, and he can watch literally each and every muscle move. Sometimes all of the blinds are open and she waltzes across to grab a book from the tiny shelf in the corner beside the window, and the snowy light will illuminate her. She hated the Massachusetts weather so much not too long ago, but Brian is glad for her moving back so he can see her thrive where she came from.

She looks excellent in the snow. Bundled up is one of his favorite styles on her, for how her round cheeks turn red and how her skin shines with warmth beneath her cozy clothes. He learns that she’s knitted a couple of her _own_ fucking scarves, and is desperate to get her knitting a matching pair for the both of them. Her insistence that it was a one-time manic obsession does not deter him.

Despite all of the strife that the winter causes the both of them (mainly her and him by proxy, the reality of it is), Brian loves it for how raw she becomes. She teaches with more passion than he could ever find within himself, taking absolutely every minute of it seriously. She comes home stretched out and exhausted, hinting that he make dinner, and then perks up into overdrive before he can even shove something in the oven, obnoxiously pointing over his shoulder, “helping” him along. 

She’s taken to playing Rachmaninoff at top volume, insisting that it’s perfect for the winter, and despite it driving him absolutely insane, the way she listens closely is too priceless to beg her to turn it off.

She goes out to dinner with her friends from the yoga school every once in a while, and Brian is invited each and every time. She introduces him as her “almost-husband,” and he forces down sprouted beans and squishy soups with five women that radiate too much light and inner peace for him to be able to appropriately engage. All of them talk amongst themselves about classes for a while, but then eventually bring the conversation back around to him, wanting to hear about his life and friends, his exercise habits and how Katya is to live with. They all laugh and nod, eyes almost unblinking, watching him as he speaks. He loves it, a little. It’s like having five more Katyas to listen to his stories, intense and validating.

He understands her better for having met them. Her unapologetic self, how she throws herself headfirst into everything, how she loves him so openly and weirdly, almost as if she wants him to know her every single secret. They all nod and give little verbal assurances every time he speaks, nodding and “ah”-ing at every opportunity. Brian likes them, genuinely. Katya watches him interact with them with the tiniest smile on her face.

Gemma, a short redhead with the biggest thighs Brian has ever seen, continuously asks him when he is going to propose to Katya. He always replies with a “ _he’ll_ propose to me if he really wants it,” and she snorts, pulls up quirky rings on the internet for him to stare at. He always feels Katya watching him out of the corner of her eye. They will never get married, but he loves the little rush he gets from imagining it- from imagining being with her until the day he dies.

Being with Katya for a Boston winter seems like something he would have dreamt up in a lovesick twenty-eight-year-old bout of depression. 

One snowy night, after a particularly dreary, emotionally rough day, Brian stands out on Gemma’s tiny apartment balcony, fat snowflakes dropping from the sky lazily through the dark. Katya is searching for more hot tea for the both of them- the most this crowd ever becomes inebriated is on miniature doses of caffeine- something that was once frustrating for Brian but is now a welcome relief.

The door swings open behind him, and Katya pushes a mug into his awaiting hand.

“Here,” she says. Brian cuddles the mug close to him. Boston winters are damp, chilling to the bone, and his light jacket and wool sweater aren’t nearly enough. “Yummy.”

He snorts at her. She’s brought out the entire jar of honey and a spoon from the kitchen, ever nursing her sweet tooth, and dumps an unreasonable amount into her tea, stuffing another spoonful into her mouth afterwards. 

“Geez, Louise,” he groans. Her eyes flash at him, and then perk up into laughing, complete joy. It’s contagious, and he kisses her a little because he knows she’ll taste like honey.

“I want to go home,” she whispers. Her face is suddenly a little bit fallen, and his heart skips a beat. “But, we’ll stay for a minute. It’s so nice out here.”

She’s looking out into the street, the white clouds overhead like when they are children under white sheets, reading a book with a yellow flashlight. She sips her tea slowly, holds onto his forearm tightly. She sways back and forth to see the entire street, the orange streetlights causing her face to glow. 

“I’m excited for summer, already. I was thinking, maybe we could get your sisters to come stay for a while? I think it would be fun for your nieces to have a kinda cabin to go to in the summer. Their uncle’s cabin! I used to do that with my cousins in the summer,” Katya mumbles. Brian tries to stop himself from grinning too big, from being too enthused by something that seems so painfully far away.

“That sounds perfect. We can set up the living room for them to sleep in,” he adds. She nods, locks eyes with him gently.

“And my yoga room, or the back porch. It would be so fun for them to sleep outside, I think.”

Brian takes her wrist in his hand, the wrist that isn’t caught up holding her steaming mug of tea. Her head leans on his shoulder, and her breath freezes right before his eyes. Inside, the ladies have started a card game, and they’re screeching with joy all together. Brian sets his tea on the railing, pulls his phone out of his pocket to see that it’s pushing 10pm, much later than either of them have been up for a long while.

Once they return home, Katya curls up on the couch and falls asleep almost immediately. He decides to let her stay there, the session of classes she’s been teaching is over, she has a week ahead to work out the inevitable kinks in her back. He covers her in a blanket and is out like a light the moment his head hits the pillow.

 

 

The rest of the winter perseveres at a snail’s pace. The snow keeps up well past March, and Brian fears that by the time they are due to move back home, in the middle of April, they’ll be coming back to a white drift completely covering all of the windows and doors of the house.

Brian starts attending Gemma’s beginner’s class religiously, and Katya scoffs at him whenever he starts to talk about how helpful it’s been to make it through the season. Katya grows close to all of her students, unloading all of their personal beef and emotional trauma on Brian at the end of every day.

Katya grows her beard out to (her words) disgusting lengths, and then crops it short, shaves it off, grows it out again. It drives Brian insane, to watch her itching it and knowing that her face is dry from the cold, until one of the ladies hands her a small bottle of coconut oil very pointedly after class. 

Brian holds Katya’s hand as they sleep at night, because sometimes she will wake up and blabber on about something from a dream, or try to sleepwalk away. His fingers in hers keep her in bed, for whatever reason. She tells him that she loves him every morning.

She gets sick somewhere in February, and continues teaching until she nearly passes out in class. Brian doesn’t take her to the hospital, at her frustrated insistence, but makes rice and mixes up spices for her every day, so that she can build up her strength. Gemma sends her flowers, with a tiny “Get Well Soon!” card that Brian props up on the table. It comforts him, every time he is reminded that she has close friends here.

He’s living with her, but he still worries. He knows that she worries about him, too. She writes him notes in the morning, reminders for leftovers in the fridge. She checks out stacks of books she thinks he’ll like at the library after classes some days, and he makes certain to report back to her on what he thinks of them when she gets home.

The domesticity of it is comforting. He hasn’t had someone to care about in so many years, and even then, he doesn’t really know of a time outside of his long relationship with Katya where he was so preoccupied with shared happiness. He didn’t think he ever would be, couldn’t imagine feeling so in love or obsessed with someone so as to think about them so often.

But with Katya it is both easy and hard. He is both content and afraid, he feels stable and unstable. It keeps him on his toes, and it keeps him living. 

 

He starts writing again, soon before they are due to return home.

The winter has turned especially awful, April showers turned into April blizzards, and Brian is finding being cooped up in the apartment much more painful than it was in January. It is ultimately what causes him to bring out his guitar, plucking away lazily one early morning, Katya long gone. The sky is close with clouds, the blankets on the couch have not been folded in weeks.

Before he knows it, words are spilling out of him at a speed that he hasn’t experienced in many years. He thinks of Katya at the studio, sweaty and instructive, and a hundred more words come out of his mind, stumbling over each other on notebook paper. He switches the fireplace on and writes, plays and maybe cries a little bit. When Katya gets home, she silently takes a shower, and then sits quietly, reading at the kitchen table, to give him his space.

It’s a kind of respect that he didn’t even know existed, in relationships. And when he is all written out, Katya has dinner ready for him. They eat, and she tells him all about her day without expecting him to listen. She has him sit on the window-seat as she sucks his dick later, what he hopes is the very last snow falling behind his head, out onto the street.

He starts recording songs on his phone, when Katya is working and the apartment is quiet. He tacks up blankets to the walls for the best acoustics he can conjure up, and takes no more than three tries for each song. Much of them have to do with the woods that he misses more than he thought he could, the women that take Katya’s classes, and Katya’s fellow teachers. They are like a coven, and he wants to document them. He has a song vaguely about Gemma, a red-haired siren that seems to be very much like Dolly’s Jolene.

He doesn’t know about showing the songs off, or releasing an album. He’s unofficially “retired,” and nobody even really knows that he’s run off with _Katya_ , of all people. It would be a little bit of a gag, to go back to LA and have an album to release, to spill his guts to any of his oldest friends about his current living situation. None of them would be surprised, but all of them would slap him on the shoulder in indignation for not telling them sooner.

It’s what motivates him to text Bob out of nowhere. They are moving out in two weeks, and Katya is only soft-packing, gathering everything they haven’t touched all winter up in bags to donate. She does this every year, she says, and he dutifully helps her bring all of the bags down to the car.

He’s stuffing the final bag in the trunk, and she moves to swing her scarf around her neck one more loop.

“How would you feel if I called up Bob and asked if I could stay at his place for a little? Like a couple of nights? Would you mind packing alone for a little?” He doesn’t even bother seeming considerate, knows she’ll approve.

“Oh, bitch, yes,” she breathes out. “You’d better do that, before we leave. I know you don’t want to drive to the train all that way once we’re back at the house. But hey-” she cuts herself off before she can finish her sentence, and he fills in the rest for her, before she can talk herself out of it.

“Oh, come with-”

“Brian,” her tone warns him. He shuts his mouth, and her arms cross in her navy blue sweater. She looks cute, hair growing out a little, due for a buzz, hoop earrings traded out for little silver studs. “I don’t know if I should come.”

“Well, I’ll text him, and you’ll think about it. Right? What could possibly go wrong,” he says. She shrugs, hops into the car, drives off. His phone dings with a confirmation and a chastising for letting the silence between them go on for so long a half hour later. Katya comes home with a little smirk, and nods when he raises his eyebrows at her.

 

 

It’s warmer in NYC. Brian hasn’t been on “vacation” like this in years, simply traveling with a significant other to stay with friends, just for fun. Katya is a little bit too spacey for him to be completely satisfied with events as they unfold, but the train ride passes without incident and they make it to Bob’s apartment with only minor confusion.

Katya has not overpacked, they are only staying for three nights in Bob’s guest bedroom. She does have her yoga mat, though, and Brian knows that it is a safety blanket for the anxiety she is vibrating with. He almost feels guilty, for putting her through this, but remembers that he believes she needs to reconnect. He knows her, knows her well enough to easily envision her happy at the end of it.

Brian rings the doorbell, taking pity on a lost-looking Katya. She lightly grasps his upper arm as they hear Bob’s footsteps behind the door, and her grip grows stronger as the door swings wide. But her hand falls as Bob takes both of them into his arms joyfully, laughing loudly just at the mere sight of them.

“The two of you! Fuck, it’s crazy to see you together. Really-” he steps back, keeping a hand on both of their shoulders. “Really together, too.”

Brian knows that Katya is blushing, but by the time that they enter the apartment and get an earful about how rude they’ve both been for disappearing, she’s squealing and gripping Bob’s shoulders in mirth as Bob pokes fun at her. Brian sneaks into the bathroom and tries not to genuinely shed a tear, pisses and splashes his face and neck with water to bring himself back to reality. He can cry later, in bed, when Katya is asleep atop him.

The three of them go out for lunch, and stay out until dinner, and spend the next three days reminiscing hardcore about everything Brian (and, he knows, Katya) has been missing the past eight years. It’s been so long, but the three of them have banter that makes it easy, and Brian is proud by the time that they head home, Katya’s phone backed up with all of the numbers Bob has provided her, all of the girls Brian knows she will want to call once they’re home and comfortable. 

A month later, they’re flying out to Los Angeles to visit Alaska, and Katya is talking at him a mile a minute the entire plane ride.

 

 

One they’re settled home again, and the sun is shining enough each day, working diligently to melt all of the snow left behind, Katya seems brighter and calmer. Brian fucks her in the kitchen, on the couch in the living room. They do some intense spring cleaning, and Katya talks with Gemma on the phone for two hours about how the trip to New York went.

There is something so cathartic about cleaning the entire home, and Brian puts his back into it, Katya working on scrubbing the counters and the oven. Brian goes out to get groceries, and Katya naps on the front porch, on the new bench they’ve put there. 

It’s easy to come back, easy to get into the same old routines. The cold stays for a while too long, but it just allows them to keep fires in the fireplace and lie on the couch together late into the evening. Brian hadn’t realized how much he had missed the woods around them- the birds, the river, the smell of it. Katya calms down, lies in bed for days on end, and then takes him all over town. She wears the same sundress for a week straight, and Brian joins her for morning meditation.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!


End file.
